TV review

Games without frontiers

Big Brother got a new housemate at the weekend: Doctor Who (BBC1, Saturday). But he's not dropping in on this current lot - Kemal, Makosi and co. It's the Big Brother house circa 202005 the Doctor finds himself inside.

Not that it's very different from now; there's actually less going on than in the 2005 house. Housemates sit around on sofas talking about nothing much. Selection is a little different though - everyone on earth is a potential contestant, picked at random. And eviction is given an extra seriousness: the moment you leave the house you are disintegrated, reduced to a pile of dust by some kind of lethal laser weapon. Only the winner gets to live. Definitely an improvement then.

It seems that if Russell T Davies's Doctor Who vision comes true, TV won't be changing much in the next 200,000 years, except that there'll be more of it and it will be nastier. Big Brother comes from the Game Station, run by Badwolf TV, which all happens on a huge satellite orbiting the earth. There are 60 Big Brother shows running concurrently, the houses arranged over 10 floors of the satellite. The Doctor's show goes out on Channel 44,000. Davina Droid, with the voice of the real Ms McCall, presides over all of them.

Elsewhere on the satellite, on different floors, other familiar shows, updated for the 2021st century, are being recorded. There's Call My Bluff with real guns, Countdown in which contestants have 30 seconds to stop a bomb going off, and Ground Force where the losers get turned into compost. There's even a version of What Not to Wear with a robot Trinny and a robot Susannah who have built-in chainsaws to decapitate their victims after sorting out their wardrobes.

Scariest of all though is The Weakest Link. It's presented by Anne Droid, who has the real Anne Robinson's voice though she looks more like those metal aliens in that old Smash ad. "For mash get Smash," those ones. Anne Droid disintegrates the loser after each round. "You are the weakest link, goodbye," she says, zapping them with the laser gun that emerges from her head. Goodbye means goodbye for ever.

Bossing the station is the Controller, a blind, female thing with lots of tentacles, like something that should live down a trench at the bottom of the deepest ocean. She's even more terrifying than current BBC boss Mark Thompson, although it turns out she's not really in control, there's an even bigger and more sinister power behind her.

It's an interesting vision of TV in the future. You can see what Russell T Davies did to get there. He just observed what's been happening in the last few years - a huge increase in the number of channels, nastier programmes, more sinister powers behind the scenes - and he just took it a bit further. I'm actually surprised it's going to take so long to get to live deaths, more than 200,000 years after the first on-screen sex. Maybe we got prudish again, there was a second Victorian age somewhere in between. Or another Mary Whitehouse. And there will certainly be reality in space well before 202005.

David Dimbleby continues to paint A Picture of Britain (BBC1, Sunday). He has come down from the romantic north of last week to explore the flatlands of East Anglia - in search of Constable's slimy posts, Gainsborough's great oaks and Stubbs's Newmarket racehorses.

In the fens, Dimbleby has problems finding his way around as it all looks exactly the same. "You don't even know if you're lost," he complains. So he abandons the trusty Land Rover for a while and commandeers a hot-air balloon instead.

You would think the fens would be the easiest place in the world to land a balloon, and to begin with it looks as if it's going perfectly; the balloon drifts slowly down over the cow parsley, like one of the old BBC idents before all that dancing happened. Then it all goes a bit Enduring Love. The basket bumps down, topples over and is dragged along on its side with Dimbleby half in and half out. Maybe there's going to be a death on camera before Russell T Davies predicted. The basket eventually comes to rest, with Dimbleby now spilled out on the grass. He laughs it off: "Here we are, with a worm's eye view of the fens, instead of a bird's eye view."

A Picture of Britain has turned into a very nice way to spend a Sunday evening.